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26 January 2002

THERE CAN be an upside to infection with a computer virus. A colleague of Feedback’s – we’ll call her Jenny to spare her blushes – discovered this recently when her computer was infected with an e-mail worm.

Most e-mail worms wend their way into your system through security loopholes in your e-mail program, most commonly Microsoft Outlook. Once inside, they snaffle the program’s address book and send out message after message to all your friends, colleagues and relatives. Each message carries a copy of itself ready to infect the unlucky recipients.

Jenny only discovered she had a worm when she began to …

Article amended on
7 November 2014

When this article was first published, it misspelt Robert Cailliau's name.